Some companies assign resources to monitor blogs, Twitter®, discussion forums related to the company's products and services, and other Internet sources of information. Some have also established a presence on Facebook® that is monitored by one or more employees and/or so-called “web scraper” applications. There are multiple ways to monitor these sites for activity related to a company and its products and services:
1. Use each site's primary web interface. This can be time consuming as it requires manually browsing the site, perhaps using search features, with each site presenting a different user experience.
2. Use tools provided by or for each site to filter content. Twitter® in particular has an active third party developer base that uses the Twitter® API to find content of interest, such as TweetScan®. This may allow automating of some of the search capabilities, but it is specific to the Twitter® site, so different tools with different capabilities would be used.
3. Many websites (blogs, discussion forums, Twitter®) provide feeds using RSS or Atom, so a person monitoring more than one service might use a feed reader, and then manually search for posts that require a response and forward them to an appropriate company representative.
4. Use a general tool such as Google® Alerts®, which monitors many web sources (e.g., news, web, blogs, video, groups . . . ) for specified search terms and deliver the results as an email or RSS/Atom feed. This is similar to No. 3 above, but it does not currently support Twitter® and may not monitor every blog of interest. Mysyndicaat.com is a similar service that aggregates content from websites, discussion forums and blogs based on keyword searches and provides the output in a viewer page or as an RSS/Atom feed.